Artist’s rendering of NASA’s Orbiting Carbon Observatory (OCO)-2, one of five new NASA Earth science missions set to launch in 2014, and one of three managed by JPL.
Credit: NASA-JPL/Caltech

LA CANADA FLINTRIDGE >> Learning from a costly failed launch in 2009, scientists with NASA and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory are anticipating the July 1 Orbiting Carbon Observatory-2 (OCO-2) launch to go off without a hitch thanks to more reliable launch technology.

OCO-2, the second of five missions this year dedicated to earth science, will launch from the Vandenberg Air Force Base next month and sample the global distribution of carbon dioxide and its effects on the planet over time. It is the first NASA mission to study carbon dioxide.

“The timing for this mission couldn’t be more appropriate, given the administration’s climate action plan recently released, (which is) focused on reducing carbon emissions,” OCO-2 program executive Betsy Edwards said Thursday via a NASA teleconference from Washington, D.C. “As we launch OCO-2, the data we provide will help our decision makers at both the local and federal levels to be better equipped to understand carbon dioxide’s role in climate change.”

OCO-2 is a “carbon copy” of OCO, project manager Ralph Basilio said during the teleconference. The only major difference between OCO and OCO-2 is the launch vehicle that will send the newest satellite to space. OCO-2 will launch on a United Air Launch Alliance Delta II rocket, which has about a 90 percent success rate, according to Randy Pollock, project architect, calibration lead and co-writer of the original OCO proposal from 2001.

In 2009, OCO traveled aboard a Taurus rocket. When the rocket carrying OCO was high above the surface, the nose cone did not detach like it was supposed to. The added weight caused the rocket to plummet back to Earth and land somewhere near Antarctica, a $275 million loss for NASA.

“It’s been almost 13-and-a-half years for me on the project, and I’m really looking forward to finally seeing this thing work in space,” Pollock said.

Noting the importance of studying Earth’s atmosphere from above, NASA administrators approved the OCO-2 redo only if the satellite was made using the same technology as OCO.

“It was supposed to save money to go with the carbon copy, otherwise we would have to restart all the engineering processes,” said Christian Frankenberg, OCO-2 research scientists. “There was nothing flawed in the design itself, so there was no reason to change anything in the instrument.”